Reviews
Boyd Tonkin
Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius is generally discussed and judged – and judgment, of course, stands at the heart of the work – by those who love, indeed revere, without any caveats this journey of the soul through death. For a long time, this reviewer could not. Even now, I can understand some Anglican bishops’ reluctance to have the work played in their cathedrals in the 1900s. Perhaps that revealed not simply small-minded anti-Catholic prejudice (the default critical position) but a credible resistance to the cruel doctrine of Purgatory. God has forgiven you, has already assured Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Ace bass-player Jasper Høiby achieved fame with his band Phronesis, recording and performing sophisticated yet accessible jazz, and establishing themselves as leaders in the crowded piano trio field. With 3Elements, and new collaborators, he is continuing to explore the seamless and inspiring combination of composition and improvisation that has characterised his work to date.The set started with solo acoustic bass: there were (probably unintentional) echoes of the North African gunbri, a lower register plucked string instrument favoured by the Gnaoua, a sect who use music and trance for Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
With the good looks and dash of his signature 1947 Triumph Roadster, the Jersey detective is back for a second season in his new incarnation: the polar opposite, seemingly, of his colleagues in Shetland.Yet Damien Molony’s Jim Bergerac has as many rain clouds over his head in sunny St Helier as Dougie Henshall’s melancholy Jimmy Perez in windy Lerwick, another single father with a demanding job and a teenage daughter to raise. Not the least of Bergerac’s problems is his simmering alcoholism, which his sporadic attendance of AA meetings can’t wholly suppress. This is a more pitiable hero than Read more ...
Simon Thompson
There’s something slightly odd about listening to Bluebeard’s Castle, Bartók’s great opera of darkness, on a sunlit spring afternoon. However, the sun streaming through the windows of Glasgow’s City Halls was the only thing wrong with this corker of a concert performance from the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and Elim Chan. And indeed, conductor Chan was the not-so-secret weapon in this concert’s success.Pacing is everything in this opera. The tension needs to heighten and steadily tighten as the successive doors are opened, becoming unbearable with the last one; yet the conductor needs Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Returning to the West End to celebrate two decades since those strange muppetty posters went up on London buses, I’m still laughing along with “Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist”.Back then, the London Olympics Opening Ceremony, surely the high watermark for progressive optimism in the public domain, was still six years in the future. We could scoff at the swivel-eyed backwoodsmen of UKIP and the likes, immigration barely registering as an issue of concern to voters. It was our world and those obsessives were, as the magnificent finale tells us, only here “For Now”.
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Gerald Barry's Salome, NSO Ireland, Kuhn, National Concert Hall, Dublin review - funny-queasy genius
David Nice
You know to expect a crazy ride, especially when Gerald Barry, greatest living Wildean and wild one among composers, has flagged up his very unStraussian take on Salome with "I didn't want her to dance, so I thought...not "dance", but "type' "(there are three typewriters of varying ages at the front of the concert platform). Right at the start, with deliberately unwieldy unison galumphings, mostly strings and lower brass, you also know it's him by the style. But you can never second-guess the extraordinary turns, both funny and dark, often both at the same time, this utterly original riff on Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
The Southbank Centre’s second Multitudes festival – which commissions artists ranging from filmmakers to acrobats to shine new light onto the orchestral repertoire – began last night in triumph with the Aurora Orchestra’s celebrated performance of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring from memory. As a musical feat alone this seemed the equivalent to building a human pyramid on a tightrope above the Thames, but the Aurora Orchestra heightened the challenge by sweeping us back to 1913 for a dramatised account of the Rite’s origin. Experiments fusing classical music and theatre are, perhaps Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Just now, everything WNO does inevitably bears the mark of their Arts Council-imposed financial troubles, and this new Flying Dutchman directed by Jack Furness is no exception. It proceeds on a bare stage largely devoid even of props, the singers costumed in the most mundane modern street-wear, no sign of the sea or ships, nothing beyond a few mysterious period-clad Scandinavians far upstage and some neutral back projections on which the audience is invited - I suppose - to bring their imaginations to bear.Of course there’s a justifying concept. “Stripping everything away,” says the designer Read more ...
Carsie Blanton & the Burning Hell, Hare & Hounds, Birmingham review - a fine revolutionary singalong
Guy Oddy
In these times of genocide, illegal invasions and a class war which the ultra-rich are emphatically winning, we clearly need a woman to point out the nonsense that we have just come to accept as the way things are meant to be. That woman is Carsie Blanton.Powered by revolutionary optimism, a guitar and a group of like-minded friends, she has plenty to say about the world – but does so with a sense of hope for the future and a wry smile. Folk, jazz, blues and ragtime songs such as “Rich People”, “Elon Musk” and “Ugly Nasty Commie Bitch” are funny but serious, hip-swinging but thoughtful and Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Antonio Pappano’s pairing for last night’s Barbican concert intrigued – and, initially, baffled – me. Shostakovich’s Fifth: a clear choice, given the London Symphony Orchestra’s recent stellar accounts of the Russian’s major symphonies. Its preface, however, came in the unpredictable form of Korngold’s violin concerto, under the bow of the supremely elegant and tasteful Vilde Frang.Between Hollywood and Leningrad, however, Pappano and his high-achieving band struck up a truly engrossing dialogue. Questions of kitsch and sentiment, of freedom and compulsion, of authenticity and artifice, Read more ...
Saskia Baron
“Since when was getting older an honour?” asks Tereza, rightly suspicious when she finds officials nailing up a cheap garland around her front door and presenting her with a medal. This is Brazil, sometime in the near future, and the government has decided that anyone over 75 is an economic burden on younger workers. No matter how fit you still are, you must hand in your work clothes and accept being shipped off to ‘the colony’ on a caged truck dubbed the wrinkle wagon. Gabriel Mascaro’s The Blue Trail is a dystopian fable, not dissimilar in its plot and casting to the more sombre Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
This entertaining, gorgeous-looking film within a film, directed and written by multi-talented Turkish-Italian Ferzan Özpetek (he’s also directed operas and written several novels), starts in the present day with a large, noisy lunch party. Özpetek plays himself, a director who’s planning a movie, Diamanti, with this company of actresses - a vaginodrome, as one calls it. It’s about the power of women, he tells them. “Is it science-fiction?” asks one, sarcastically. He hands out scripts and everyone reads quietly.Özpetek moved to Rome from Istanbul in 1976 and his meta-film, based on his own Read more ...